"Harlan County," he said. "Sable Creek Township. Township Nine North, Range Fourteen West. Section Fifteen, northeast quarter. The school lot. Here." He moved his finger an inch to the right, across a ruled line. "Section Fourteen. The Red Willow claim, patented to Joseph Red Willow in 1881, one hundred and sixty acres, every acre of it his and now his heirs'. Nobody has taken an inch of it. The line runs where it runs."
The two young men behind Amos had come up closer. One of them said something in their own language, short and low, and the girl on the paint mare laughed once without any humor in it.
Cora looked at the plat. She looked at the clean brown lines and the little red circle and the dry fork wandering through, and she turned the paper a little on the sill so that the sun fell on the bottom of it.
"It has the territorial seal," she said.
She heard how it sounded in the quiet afterward: like a child holding up a slate with the answer copied from the back of the book. She did not take it back. The seal was real. She could feel it under her thumb.
Amos looked at the seal and then at her.
"Paper takes any mark you press on it," he said. "Ask my mother what the ground takes."
***
The old woman had already let go of the mare's shoulder.
She walked down the east slope of the knoll, past the woodshed, to a place where the bank of the fork had slumped into a fan of sand, slowly but without hesitation, the way a person walks to a well in the dark. She knelt. It took her some time. One of the young men swung down to help and she waved him off without looking.
Cora had walked past that spot a thousand times and seen nothing there but sand.
The old woman began to brush the sand away with her hands.
She did it the way you would brush flour off a table, and the sand ran away in little hissing streams. A gray shape came up out of it: a squared block of pale stone the size of a bread box, set upright and deep, its top worn round by weather. The old woman brushed the last of the sand off its face with her fingertips, and then she sat back on her heels.